Essential Elements
This essential element acknowledges the importance of understanding traditional subject areas.
What is Knowledge?
This attribute describes students who act with integrity and honesty, with respect for the dignity and rights of people.
What is principled?
These are now subsumed within the descriptors of the learner profile and are no longer a separate element.
What are attitudes?
This is the process initiated by students or the teacher that moves the students from their current level of understanding to a new and deeper level of understanding through questioning.
What is inquiry?
This is one sentence in each unit that expresses concisely an understanding that is substantial enough to generate in-depth inquiries; is concept-driven; promotes the ability to think critically; and challenges and extends students' prior knowledge.
What is central idea?
This element is central to the philosophy of PYP because it leads to structured inquiry as a vehicle for learning.
What are key concepts?
This attribute stresses the importance of appreciating our own culture as well as the values and traditions of others.
What is open-minded?
This embodies a holistic design, incorporating both a backward and forward-looking approach in which the teacher monitors, documents, measures and reports on learning using an integrated, ongoing process.
What is Assessment?
In the final year of the PYP, all students complete a programme-specific project that allows them to demonstrate a consolidation of their learning.
What is exhibition?
These are ideas to be studied that clarify the central idea and define the scope of a unit.
What are lines of inquiry?
This element showcases the importance of service to fellow students and to the larger community, both in and outside the school.
What is action?
This attribute includes the attitudes of empathy, respect and commitment, describing students that are compassionate and act to make a positive difference in the lives of others and the world around them.
What is caring?
The power to take meaningful and intentional action, acknowledging the rights and responsibilities of the individual, supporting voice, choice and ownership for everyone in the learning community.
What is agency?
The identification of a framework of what's worth knowing; what we want to learn.
What is written curriculum?
A set of criteria against which both the school and IB can measure success in the implementation of IB. These criteria were used for our self-evaluation for the self-study last year.
What are the programme standards and practices?
This element used to be called Transdisciplinary Skills but has recently been renamed.
What is Approaches to Learning?
This attribute describes students who give thoughtful consideration to their own learning and experience. They are able to assess and understand their strengths and limitations in order to support their learning and personal development.
What are reflective learners?
The three pillars of the transdisciplinary curriculum framework in the enhanced PYP.
What are the learner, learning and teaching and the learning community?
The ongoing process of gathering, analyzing, reflecting and acting on evidence of student learning to inform teaching.
What is assessment?
These facilitate planning for a conceptual approach to transdisciplinary and subject-specific learning and form the component that drives the teacher- and/or student-constructed inquiries that lie at the heart of the PYP curriculum.
What are key concepts?
There are 5 Approaches to Learning (formerly called Transdisciplinary Skills). Name all 5.
What are thinking, social, communication, research and self-management skills?
This attribute embeds the attitudes of independence and cooperation, approaching uncertainty with forethought and determination while exploring new ideas and innovative strategies; resourceful and resilient in the face of challenges and change.
What is a risk-taker?
This is considered as a dynamic outcome of agency, and an integral part of the learning process that can arise at any time, within or outside the programme of inquiry and might come in the form of: participation, advocacy, social justice, social entrepreneurship, and life choices.
What is Action?
A model where themes of global significance that transcend the confines of the traditional subject areas frame the learning throughout the primary years to promote an awareness of the human condition and an understanding of the commonality of human existence.
What is transdisciplinary learning?
There are 6 Themes in our Programme of Inquiry. Name all 6.
What is: Who We Are, Where We are in Place and Time, How We Express Ourselves, How the World Works, How We Organize Ourselves, and Sharing the Planet?